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Google Glass, the augmented-reality “smart glasses” that failed, epically, to capture the imagination of the general public, did not tank solely on account of their astronomically high price (originally $1,500 U.S.).

According to tech consultant, Ian Altman, writing in Forbes last year, Google Glass floundered because it failed to answer, for a mass audience, two questions that are essential to any tech product’s success: “What problem does it solve?” and “Why would I need it?”

Unfortunately, it turned out that the only customers who could readily answer these questions were well-heeled geeks, a community that knows and loves gadgets, but is historically out to lunch when it comes to fashion.

After all, Google Glass wasn’t merely uncool. It was outright hideous: an inelegant, wiry thing reminiscent of Geordi La Forge’s blindness-corrective visor on Star Trek; an apparatus that may soon enough find its way into a Buzzfeed style-nostalgia list.

In other words, it is the future laughingstock of adolescents who will consider it wild that their parents ever thought such a clunky piece of technology could catch on in the mainstream.

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But the same laughs will not be had, I suspect, at the expense of Google Glass’s progeny: Spectacles. The new wearable technology from Snapchat, or Snap Inc., as the social network recently rebranded itself, has already managed to achieve something Google couldn’t. It has developed wearable technology that is fashionable and cool.

Spectacles are sunglasses that contain a built-in video camera that enables the wearer to record the world as they see it, hands-free, with the tap of a button on the top left corner of the frames.

The device’s battery lasts about a day and an outward facing light alerts people nearby that the camera is in recording mode. It can record up to 30 seconds of footage, which is transferred wirelessly to the app on the wearer’s phone.

Snap declined comment to the Star for this column, but the company has already launched a slick, sexy, fashion-editorial-style ad campaign, as well as announced that a limited number of Spectacles will be available for purchase later this fall for $129.99. The price is steep, but no steeper than a pair of Nike Air Force 1s.

And it is for this reason that we should be very, very afraid.

Because while Google Glass was easy to spot from metres away, thanks to its clunky weirdness (and of course the fact that hardly anyone in the world owned a pair), Spectacles appear in many ways like any other pair of hip, oversized sunglasses.

This means that if Snap succeeds where Google failed, and Spectacles catch on, avoiding the product’s gaze may be very difficult, especially in a crowded, public place.

Of course, if people begin wearing the gadget or some version of it, en masse, we may see a much-needed decrease in the number of concertgoers and music-festival attendees who block the view of revellers behind them by raising their phones up in the air to record footage of the stage. The glasses will allow the hyper-connected to capture those invaluable moments sans phone.

But this advantage doesn’t count for much when you consider the likelihood that the glasses will render it nearly impossible to tell when you are being video-recorded in a crowd.

A phone is easy enough to avoid, but the flashing light of a tiny camera affixed to a pair of sunglasses? Not so much.

And then of course there is the heartening effect the technology could have on wannabe voyeurs and peddlers of revenge porn. You can already picture the college fraternity challenge: “All right boys, put on a pair of these Snap sunnies and capture as much unsuspecting tail as you can!”

But the creepiest Spectacle-inspired thought of all is the possibility that someday, not far off, nobody will care about any of the above — that in addition to laughing off Google Glass as an ugly failure, young people will also laugh off the notion that such a product and its offspring were ever controversial.

Privacy, the right to go about the world unobserved and unrecorded, may not be extinct just yet. But it’s on its way to becoming quaint.

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